How to get started in property investment: part 1

Rhys Drake: I suppose the money that could be made is what caught my attention.

It’s a pretty simple concept. One of the main things that’s always stuck in my brain is I always used to read those BRW rich lists of people who have made money and how they made money and it was always either mining, property or some kind of technology thing.

Mining wasn’t my thing and technology, no I’m not really into that kind of stuff that much, so property was the only thing.

My dad always taught me from an early age to get into property and it just fitted for me. I just liked it. Something tangible, it’s there, it’s an asset, it’s touchable, feelable.

It’s just easier than shares and other options and all the rest of it.

Amanda Ikin: I guess the original thoughts behind it was, given our age we’re still quite a way off getting superannuation and funding ourselves at that point in time. So our initial trigger point was our superannuation.

My husband was a professional sports player, so he didn’t have to contribute to super. So he obviously doesn’t have a lot behind him. I’ve got a fairly significant super fund – but we realised that even if the property didn’t grow a whole lot in value, in 30 years we’d own it outright and that would still be prior to when we would be eligible for the pension. Plus we’d have someone helping us pay it off along the way.

So our thought process there was, worst case scenario, we’ve got a property that we own outright, that gives us options. Either it’s created a pension for us by the rental income, or we can sell it and create an income for ourselves in that respect as well.

That was the initial thought process behind investing in property.

Helen Nguyen: I’ve always had an interest in property investing. Even as a child I imaged accumulating a collection of properties and waiting for the time when I would turn 18 so that I could buy my first property.

My main motivation for investing in property, like many other investors, is that one-day I want to be able to live comfortably using the income from my property portfolio.

My mum is a single mother and growing up my brother and I always lived in rented properties and owning even one property seemed a huge challenge to overcome, let alone investing in multiple properties.

Helen Christie: I think we just got ourselves into a financial position where we could afford it.

I was either going to go out and buy more shoes or I was going to buy something for our future

We had equity in our house and, just through saving a lot and putting as much money as we could on our home, it just made sense to us.

I was either going to go out and buy more shoes or I was going to buy something for our future and for our kids’ future and so it just kind of made sense. To us it seemed like the next logical financial step for us to do that.

We wanted our money to work for us too.

Emily Greenaway: I always knew that I wanted to invest property, but with my situation, I always had financial limitations that it just never seemed like a possible prospect for me.

When I was at the lowest of the low – I couldn’t possibly have gotten any lower – I was lucky enough to be introduced to a mentor up in Sydney who I did a property course with. I borrowed the money from my Granddad at the time and paid him back later. That allowed me to study and do some education around property investing and it showed me a way that I could basically get into the property market with little or no money. I was pretty much hands in the air, that was me. So I thought if this is for real, then I was all for it.

So I went and I learnt various different strategies. But basically I took my own limitations away and I guess it changed my life in the sense that it opened up a world of opportunity that never existed before. And taking away the limitation of money meant that I could look at property in a creative sense and I guess find opportunities that I probably wouldn’t have even seen if I did have the money in the first place.
So it changed my thinking and got me to think creatively around negotiating property deals.